Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

Massachusetts, where I live, has been quietly leading the way toward freeing state government from proprietary software and document formats. In 2004 there was talk that proprietary software would be out completely, but that didn’t pan out. Instead, they’ve moved forward with plans to require government offices to use only open document formats. Friday’s article in the Boston Globe notes:

The policy change wouldn’t affect only Microsoft. The state uses other programs, such as IBM’s Lotus Notes and the word processing program WordPerfect, that employ proprietary file formats. These products would also have to be replaced, or upgraded to versions that work with the OpenDocument standard.

Recordings from this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention have started showing up over on the excellent ITConversations. First up is Nat Torkington and Tim O’Reilly speaking about O’Reilly Radar.

I’m looking forward to seeing more sessions appear in the coming weeks – especially the ones I didn’t get to!

Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple’s KEEPING ME DOWN again.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since “Anarchie” days) to David Kocher’s Cyberduck. There’s no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It’s a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks – notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as “Edit With” – this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.

At OSCON I learned that just up the Willamette River from Portland, in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab hosts www.mozilla.org. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They also provide hosting and/or mirror services to Apache, KDE, Xiph.org, Debian, Gentoo, and others. In the early ’90s I briefly lived in Corvallis and this just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Public universities have a long history with open source – my server would not be what it is without Berkeley in particular – but I don’t come across a lot of explicit advocacy from schools beyond the level of individual employees or researchers who work on projects of their own volition. Public universities should be big backers of open source, I think, so I hope that OSU’s example is inspirational.

If my scanty coverage of the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention wasn’t enough for you, check out these excellent, thorough post-show wrapups from Andy Oram at O’Reilly and Slashdot (though I recommend setting your score threshold to 5 as always, in this case to boil down a “Ruby On Rails Doesn’t Scale” thrash).

The above were my two favorites from O’Reilly’s general OSCON wrapup page; it also includes links to Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, and Delicious tag searches if you want to read every last bit of prose posted about the convention. Also, you may find some of the presentation files interesting or useful, especially if you’re an attendee with spotty notes.